Dawn Potter: Senior Photo, 1982
They say there is a me
who is beautiful but I
snub her in the chalk-dust
hallways, on the bronzed
fields.
Joel Christensen: What Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ can teach us about reentering the world after a year of isolation
Homer can help guide us as we return back to our normal worlds after a year of minimizing social contact. He can also, I believe, offer guidance on how people can heal.
Stephen Dobyns: The Miracle of Birth
As they joylessly wait for reassignment,
they dangle their feet into the blue abyss at the brink
of heaven like boys on a wall bumping their sneakers
on the bricks below.
Chard deNiord: “We Will Not Give Up on Each Other”: A Conversation with Major Jackson
We are living in an age of absurdity, but I am casting for wider seas.
Michael Simms: American Ash (text and video)
Old warriors rarely
say anything about
people they killed or
horrors they saw
Siegfried Sassoon: ‘The Hero’
The cruelty in this poem is overwhelming – as Sassoon intended. So opposed was he to jingoistic propaganda, he deliberately slashed very tender imagery with the sharpest irony.
Jose Padua: Directions in Music and Other Ways of Approaching the Day
what he wants to do
sounds better than
what I want to do
we sit in the car
and listen
until the song is over
Yana Djin: “Doctorow” by Dmitry Melnikoff
Doctorow comes out onto the dark shore,
holding a hand over his worn-out heart
Michael T. Young: Sitting in the Dark
On the day another black man is shot
I sit with my family watching sparrows
pick through soil warmed in sunlight.
Rachel Hadas: The Mothers on the Wall
Young men stamping; clouds of dust their feet
Stir up; the gleaming weapons and the heat –
the women, poised and fearful, gazing down
as the squadron marches out of town
Paul Christensen: Rainy and Cold Today
The soul is hungry in spring, and there is only the crisp, silent air to feed it.
Jason Irwin: A Stillness Nearly Mineral | The poetry of Robert Gibb
A stillness which is very nearly mineral
Keeps insisting upon the essential
Loneliness with which this light is filled.
Lisel Mueller: Alive Together
Speaking of marvels, I am alive
together with you, when I might have been
alive with anyone under the sun
George Drew: Early Morning at the West Side Y
My God! The man with long white hair
waiting for an elevator on the thirteenth floor
is Edgar Winter, blear-eyed from a night
spent raising the roof at the Fillmore East.
